marv

so my stitches came out last monday. it looks like it's completely healed superficially. you can barely tell that it was gaping hole a week ago. there's still a giant lump on the inside and i cant feel the left side of my lip (i'm guessing i severed a ton of nerve endings?) but nevertheless, no infections, clean heal. i'm very thankful.

i haven't been able to go down and pick up live rock off of the reef yet so i just bit the bullet and picked up some live plants and a few critters for my fish tank from petsmart. one was a little red wag fish i named Pam. the other is a little red crab i named Marv. I say 'was' and 'is' because Pam swam around for about 10 minutes and croaked. I felt horrible. Like, for a day or two afterwards and everything. It's hard work. I thought I had the levels and everything where they should be. I guess I need to read more. Ol' Marv is just fine though. I bought a little pagoda looking house for him and he loves it. when i get home from work i hide a freeze dried brine shrimp behind a plant or a shell for him. he pokes his little eyes out of the window of his pagoda to see if the coast is clear and then he'll come out and snack. shrimpie time for Marv is becoming my favorite time of day. it's hilarious.

Call of Duty 3: Modern Warfare
for XBOX360
I'm no good at videogames. At least in comparison to people like Adam. I think over 80 percent of the videogames I've ever played since NES I never even got close to beating. Computer animated bad guys shoot at you, the screen flashes red, your health depletes, the controller shakes, it just a little too much anxiety for me. I bought an xbox360 because I wanted to play online with Adam and talk to him over the headsets since we live farther away. I guess this review is about how far videogame technology has come since the days of playing Duck Hunt in our grandparent's den.

Adam told me to pick this game up. He said it was it was super fun. It's also won almost every videogame award and has been dubbed "game of the year" and the most "photo-realistic game ever created". Most videogames you run around, shoot stuff, run around some more, and then it's over and I think that gets pretty old. Normally I only play one until I die and then I say "forget it" and go do something else, never worrying about getting shot at again. I was surprised that when I started playing COD4 I had to force myself to turn it off and go to sleep. It's that addictive and that engrossing.

It's split between playing two different soldiers. You play as a Marine fighting street combat in a depiction of the battle for Baghdad. The second you play as a British SAS soldier fighting along different fronts in Russia. The missions range from defending a tank while fighting insurgents from the streets of a fictionalized Baghdad to sneaking through abandoned apartments and alleyways of radioactive Chernobyl.

I cant get over how much detail and attention to realism they put into games now. Coupled with how powerful the xbox360 console is, it's as close as you can get to being in a firefight than actually being in one. I think? I've never been in a gunfight. And that's where this game shines for me, the amount of detail to realism. When a grenade goes off next to your soldier, the sound dims to near nothing and all you hear is the whistling of your ear drums. When you aim down your sights, the background blurs respectively in your peripherals. Your squad yells out for cover fire when they need it. Insurgents flank you in the alleyways. Even in terms of gameplay, it's not completely running and shooting between levels. Some levels are intermissions of the sort. Like during the scene when a nuclear bomb goes off and knocks your helicopter out of the air. You can look around from the back of it while it crashes and then walk around the burning streets for a few moments until your character dies. Your vision is all red and you can hear your character coughing. The screen lurches back and forth and you even have to press a button to get him back on his feet after he falls from the pain. It's all part of the story and it really draws you in. To some, that's just interference between running and shooting, but for me, it made the game really interesting and kept me playing. And it's full of little things like these.

Probably the sweetest thing I found in the game is that they incorporated my truck, the 1991 Toyota crew cab 4wd pickup truck into it. Perfectly modeled into the game. You can find them all over the streets of Baghdad. I spent about five minutes looking in and around it when I found one. Even the center console and the seats are like mine. And then I shot out the windows and tires and lobbed a grenade into the back of it and watched it explode. It was so awesome blowing up my own truck in videogame form.

So if you happen to be at Best Buy and they have a TV hooked up with this game running, take a minute and play it, or at least watch someone play it. I think it's the most advanced videogame ever made.

Here are a few videos of it.

Street fighting on the Baghdad level


nuclear explosion level (pause at 1:10 to see my truck :) )


Trailer